Linguistics

I am getting so used to this island it’s becoming like second nurture to me.

Christine Wertheim’s recently released book mUtter-bAbel is gorgeously hyperbolic, a primordial pataphysics of text and drawings that explores relationships between babies, mothers, language, and “ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects.”

The linguistic contortions in Roussel’s work have influenced artists and writers from Duchamp to Foucault to Ashbery. Two recent translators of Roussel discuss his outlandish creations.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Rae Armantrout on her new book of poetry, Money Shot, and its dealings with value—in life, porn, and capitalism—through an email exchange with poet Ben Lerner.

No Sparkly Pens, Please

Verbs. Label each verb Action or Linking.

Just as the culture is poised to relegate the book and its readers to a lost era, there comes into our presence Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects to arouse our most intense desire to curl up by a winter fire with a book—this book—in our hands.

Dissolution of the totalitarian Soviet regime brought Russia democracy of an imperfect sort. But much of the euphoria of the early nineties has dissipated in the face of new realities.

Racing thoughts: Artist and poet Marjorie Welish speaks to the legendary painter on the eve of his Fall 1996 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Harry Mathews has covered the literary terrain: as short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, translator and editor.